The Story of Chedz

By: Mercedes "Chedz" Corazo

In 1973, I was a fresh graduate from UP,finishing BS in Hotel and Restaurant Administration. Because of my passion for baking, I started baking bread for sale, from our home in Greenhills, Mandaue City. My siblings and I did all the baking from our kitchen to serve our neighbors in our subdivision. Very soon, word spread about this home bakeshop and people from as far as Cebu City came to Greenhills to buy our freshly baked round pan de sal, which not only looked unique but tasted good as well. We decided to name our bakeshop, Lola Pureza's Bakeshop, after our grandmother who bequeathed to me her love for baking and some of her baking tools. After a few years, I decided to bake cakes. This came about after a wedding cake I made for good friends Al and Ann Cusi. I thank them for trusting me to make their wedding cake even if I did not have any experience. The only background I had was a one week course on cake decorating and sugar flower making. For their cake, it took me two weeks just to make the sugar flowers and my hands were swollen from making them. At that time, I thought their wedding cake was the most beautiful cake I had ever seen. I know I would dread to look at a picture of that first wedding cake now because I know it would look so unprofessionally made. But that started it all and I will forever be grateful to Al and Ann Cusi. Orders for all occasion cakes started to come. I placed into each cake that eye for detail , making sure that each cake not only looked good but tasted good as well. So, orders just kept coming. Business was doing well and we felt that there was a future here. In the meantime, my brother , Danny ,had developed a line up of pasalubong products , after being successful with his first venture, Lola Pureza's Peanut Browas. Our Lola Pureza's line of pasalubong products had taken off,so we decided to have a separate identity for our cake line, so that's why the name Chedz came about. We decided on Chedz because not known to many, my second name is Zantipha, that's why the letter "z" after Ched. We thought that it would be good for the customers to connect the name with the person behind it. Keeping it just one syllable was a good idea,making it easy to remember. Chedz sounded good, we thought. So the name stuck. After I took courses in Fine Arts at UP, I gained some confidence being a cake designer, so we changed the name to Designer Cakes by Chedz. It later evolved to chedzcakes.com when we started selling cakes on the internet.

I simply enjoy designing cakes, sometimes taking days just thinking of a design for a birthday cake or a wedding cake. At some point, I knew that this was something I wanted to do for the rest of my life.